How the border surge upended a small Wisconsin town

To its residents, Whitewater, Wisconsin, was a sleepy college town of about 15,000 — until a thousand migrants arrived in 2022 and 2023, straining the community's resources beyond the breaking point.

Now officials may have to raise revenue to cover additional costs of law enforcement and educating the influx of students who can't speak English.

"Please just stop the bleeding," Henri Kinson, a former school board member in the community, told members of Congress on Thursday as the House Judiciary Committee visited Wisconsin for a field hearing on the ramifications of the Biden border surge.

Amid troubling headlines about high-profile crimes and migrant gang takeovers of housing projects, the hearing explored less notorious impacts, such as adding as many as 300 children to a 1,200-student school district.

Mr. Kinson said the migrants have forced schools to pour money into English Language Learning classes to try to get the newcomer kids up to speed. The trade-off is less money to spend on the regular curriculum for other students.

That creates a negative feedback loop, with engaged parents then pulling their kids out of the school district to send them elsewhere. Even the current school board president has done so, Mr. Kinson said.

He said Whitewater schools have experienced the largest drop in academic achievement in the state over the last four years.

"Migrant children are almost always both economically disadvantaged and ESL and sometimes special needs as well," Mr. Kinson said.

Dodge County Sheriff Dale Schmidt said law enforcement worries about the reach of smuggling cartels deep into the U.S., fearing the kind of chaos those cartels have spawned in Mexico.

"We have cartel members in every single county," he said.

Rick Rachwal described the horror of his family entering the college dorm room of his 19-year-old son Logan in Milwaukee in 2021 to find his lifeless body, with a stuffed animal next to it. He died after ingesting a counterfeit pill laced with fentanyl.

He blamed the migrant surge for distracting U.S. border authorities, preventing them from doing more to stop the fentanyl that's pouring in across the U.S.-Mexico boundary.

"These criminal organizations are in our own backyard and yet our borders remain wide open," he told the Republican members of Congress.

Jacob Curtis, director of the Center for Investigative Oversight, did a study of the migrant surge in Whitewater and said the 1,000-migrant influx was, if anything, a conservative tally.

He said the surge was fueled by three major factors: a surfeit of available student housing after the pandemic, a need for farm and manufacturing labor and a congregation of families ready to sponsor migrants.

Among the city reports he compiled were children sleeping in sheds in subzero temperatures, a 14-year-old girl forced to work 30 hours a week by her father and the discovery of a child discarded in a ditch.

He said the police department has been stretched to deal with more cases, such as driving without a license, which saps the department's ability to do proactive policing.